I need some help with some new suggestions for what I want from my tiny homeserver, made up by a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB (passive cooling case) and an external hard drive. That server will not be reachable from outside my home network, if that makes a difference for suggestions.

I am looking for an easy solution that works well on the limited resources of the Rpi. What I mostly need is an app I can self-host that has a nice and well performing gallery function, I got tons of old photos from when I still used digital cameras a lot. Those are already sorted in folders, and I want that app to not mess with that at all, just read them basically.

What I also need is for that app to be able to auto-upload new photos from my phone regularly, so I can include them more easily in backups of my server. I also do not want them to be weirdly hidden in some strange folder structures, so that they remain accessible if I want to change apps again down the road.

Here is what I tried already: Photoprism - loved it in general, but all the indexing was super slow on the Rpi of course. I didn’t really need the AI features of it either. It also made quite big thumbnails for the image analysis so it would really add a huge requirement of a ton more storage space just for features I did not want to use, I understand those could be downscaled but the process seemed tedious and resource-intensive. Overall wasn’t practical for the Rpi, if I had a stronger server I’d try again.

Nextcloud - thats the current solution I am looking at, since it got all I want. Auto-upload, easy access, no resource-heavy features I don’t need. But overall, it is pretty slow on the Rpi for scrolling through photo libraries. I found today the NC Photos app on Google Play Store, which seems to work better than the Nextcloud App to look at galleries, but still seems slow.

Aside from that I found out about Immich, but cannot test it right now since my Rpi runs on 32bit. But it sounded to me like a lighter type of Photoprism app, maybe not fair to say, I know its supposed to be like Google Photos. But the stuff it does for face recognition and what else makes it sound again like a choice I won’t enjoy using on the Rpi. Maybe that is an unfair view? I see recently the feature that allows external libraries in it, was added, so that fits my needs.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this, I will end with the question, are there any other solutions that I haven’t considered so far?

  • @[email protected]English
    4•1 year ago

    Maybe https://github.com/bpatrik/pigallery2

    As far as auto-upload goes, unless using Immich I would just use an app such as Foldersync and connect via whatever protocol you want; webdav, sftp, smb, etc…

    Nextcloud is slow even on good hardware, so that’s not too much of a surprise.

    Immich seems pretty lightweight and is very fast for scrolling galleries, it does run a lot of stuff on import for face recognition and whatnot, but that’s only once and then it’s done.

    • RBGOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Thanks!

      I forgot about pigallery2, I actually also had it running for a bit. Just for viewing what I had it was ok, but no app, all in browser and performance was also so-so for me. Well, faster than Nextcloud for sure.

      The reason why I want this all in one app is to be able to set this up for the less techy users in my home. I did consider just one thing for syncing, one for the gallery, but that gets already too complicated for other people.

      Do you know whats the storage overhead in Immich for these extra functions? Photoprism added a significant amount of data so it was in my eyes unreasonable to use, like up to a third of the size of the actual gallery with standard settings.

        • RBGOPEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Thanks, I wasn’t aware it’s optional.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        Immich stores thumbnails, but they’re pretty small size compared to the originals.

        You can also disable the face recognition stuff if you don’t want it.

        I’d say it’s definitely the most user friendly option out there.

        • RBGOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Alright, you got me curious. I am going to try it with disabling all the resource intense ML parts.

      • RBGOPEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        You mean for pigallery2? You don’t need any, I just opened it to test.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•1 year ago

          Yes. For some reason yesterday, while trying to use the demo it just returned a login screen. Strangely, today it just logs in automatically.

  • @homegrowntechieEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    You’re on the right track with nextcloud however using the built-in photos app is going to be very slow. You should install the nextcloud memories app and you will see a very significant improvement in speed.

    • RBGOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thanks for the tip, I will give it a try. I feel thats another issue I have with Nextcloud, there are so many differrent apps for it, feels so fragmented at times.

      • @homegrowntechieEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        That’s the beauty of next cloud in my opinion. You only need to enable the apps that you need. It would be nice if there was a little bit better discovery when it comes to finding apps. The app store is useful but only internal next cloud apps seem to be promoted there.